I will swear on a stack of bibles the following is true. This event took place in our home at the time in St. Paul, Minnesota around 1990. Many years ago when my children were perhaps somewhere around four to six years of age, their dad was very sick and had been given a prescription to take. Apparently, he thought that the prescription meds were not strong enough, so he also took an over-the-counter med like NyQuil or something like that at the same time. He was lying on the couch in the living room. I had previously sent the kids upstairs to get their pajamas on.
While I was folding clothes across from him, I glanced over and saw his head sort of drop to the side. He appeared to be in a very deep sleep. For a while things were quiet. The TV was on and our German shepherd was sleeping comfortably on the floor. Suddenly, my husband started talking with his eyes closed and head still dropped to the side. He said, "I don't know how to do it. I don't know how to cut it." At that moment I wasn't worried because we had recently decided to re-wallpaper the upstairs bathroom, and it had more than a couple of odd angles to it. So I just assumed he was referring to the wallpapering project.
Well, the next words out of his mouth were, "I only have one potato. People are starving, people are dying and I don't know how to cut it." Those were the last words he said in English. After that, he lapsed into fluent German! I knew it was German because he said a couple of German words that I knew at the time. One of them was the German word for potato, which of course, I can't remember now what it was. Anyway, he also used the word fräulein twice. Initially, I thought he was joking around, although I have to admit I was quite surprised by his fluent German. Ever since I had known him, he claimed he could not speak more than a few words.
I decided to play along with him, so I asked him was his name was, and he said, "Constantine __________"! He said a last name, but I blanked on it. I asked him what year it was, hoping that my husband would break out into laughter. He didn't. He jerked his head to the other side and said, "Nein," which doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that that means "No."
It was around that moment when I realized something very unusual was happening -- he clearly wasn't faking. I didn't know what to do. All I could think of was that I wanted evidence of this because no one was going to believe me. Chelsey had some sort of kid's tape recorder, so I ran upstairs to get it and in the meantime yelled to Sean, the oldest, to come down and be a witness to what was happening. When we arrived back in the living room, I asked my husband the same questions and he repeated them using the same responses and mannerisms. Unfortunately, I couldn't get the tape recorder to work, but Sean was a credible witness. He heard his dad speaking in fluent German.
Anyway, we stood there for a minute just listening and not moving. All of a sudden, there were three loud bangs at the door -- Bang-bang-bang. Our German shepherd jumped up and went crazy barking and growling. I ran to the door, opened it, but there was no one there! I swear to God. I ran back to the living room. My husband was just waking up, shaking his head from side to side when we heard glass breaking upstairs. This was the first time I became frightened because my little girl was up there by herself. I ran upstairs to find her sitting on her bed staring back at me, apparently none the worse for the wear. I asked her if she heard the glass breaking. She nodded her head and pointed toward the bathroom. I picked her up and I carried her cautiously down the hall to the bathroom. We never found any broken glass anywhere.
